r in the humblest terms. She exhibited
no signs of the Tudor animation that was in reality so strong a part of
her character.

But, coming to the throne, she threw away her modesty and brawled and
rioted with very little self-restraint. The people as a whole found
little fault with her. She reminded them of her father, the bluff King
Hal; and even those who criticized her did so only partially. They
thought much better of her than they had of her saturnine sister, the
first Queen Mary.

The life of Elizabeth has been very oddly misunderstood, not so much for
the facts in it as for the manner in which these have been arranged and
the relation which they have to one another. We ought to recollect that
this woman did not live in a restricted sphere, that her life was not
a short one, and that it was crowded with incidents and full of vivid
color. Some think of her as living for a short period of time and speak
of the great historical characters who surrounded her as belonging to a
single epoch. To them she has one set of suitors all the time--the Duc
d'Alencon, the King of Denmark's brother, the Prince of Sweden, the
russian potentate, the archduke sending her sweet messages from
Austria, the melancholy King of Spain, together with a number of her
own brilliant Englishmen--Sir William Pickering, Sir Robert Dudley, Lord
Darnley, the Earl of Essex, Sir Philip Sidney, and Sir Walter Raleigh.

Of course, as a matter of fact, Elizabeth lived for nearly seventy
years--almost three-quarters of a century--and in that long time there
came and went both men and women, those whom she had used and cast
aside, with others whom she had also treated with gratitude, and who had
died gladly serving her. But through it all there was a continual change
in her environment, though not in her. The young soldier went to the
battle-field and died; the wise counselor gave her his advice, and
she either took it or cared nothing for it. She herself was a curious
blending of forwardness and folly, of wisdom and wantonness, of
frivolity and unbridled fancy. But through it all she loved her people,
even though she often cheated them and made them pay her taxes in the
harsh old way that prevailed before there was any right save the king's
will.

At the same time, this was only by fits and starts, and on the whole
she served them well. Therefore, to most of them she was always the good
Queen Bess. What mattered it to the ditcher and yeoman, far from